Epicserve

Google Calendar is good but I won't be using it

April 14, 2006 | 9:34 a.m. CDT

Google has recently launched a new web application called Google Calendar. So naturally I thought I would try it out. I think I like almost every aspect of the Calendar. It has some really neat extras that just make it fun to use like when you click on delete the whole page is faded except for an alert box that pops up. I also love how on the month view you can click and drag to highlight the days that the event takes place.

But even with all the fun and thrills there is one feature that is missing that will prevent me from actually using the Calendar on a daily basis and that's the fact that there isn't a way to have reminders sent to a non-Gmail e-mail address. I copy and forward my emails that go to my regular email address to Gmail so that I have a back up of all my email messages. So having reminders go to Gmail doesn't do me any good. I'm kind of surprised Google didn't think to let you use a non-Gmail email address for reminders. It lets you use a cell phone for reminders but I'm a little nervous about using that feature because I don't want to get charged up the ying yang for having a bunch of text messages sent to my cell phone.

Related tags: Calendar, Google

Comments

Jeff Croft
1.   At 10:14 a.m. CDT on April 14, 2006, Jeff Croft wrote:

You sure that's accurate? I haven't played with it too much yet, but it seems like it sends reminders to whatever e-mail address your Google account is tied to (which doesn't have to do a G-mail -- mine isn't). :)

Brent O'Connor
2.   At 10:58 a.m. CDT on April 14, 2006, Brent O'Connor wrote:

I tested it and I didn't receive a reminder in my gmail seconday e-mail address inbox.

Nathan Smith
3.   At 2:07 p.m. CDT on April 14, 2006, Nathan Smith wrote:

I'm an avid Gmail user, to it blends nicely with what I'd want it for. Still, it does seem like a major oversight on their part to leave out other email addresses. I can't help but feel like it's an effort to strong-arm people into using Gmail. Yet, it's still invitation (through a friend) only, odd.

Brent O'Connor
4.   At 4:24 p.m. CDT on April 14, 2006, Brent O'Connor wrote:

Nathan, well like I said I love the calendar application. But it's just not that useful to me if I can't get reminders some how. :)

Ben Perry
5.   At 10:24 a.m. CDT on April 19, 2006, Ben Perry wrote:

I don't think I will be using it because there doesn't seem to be a way to synchronize with PDAs or Outlook / Evolution / whatever your favorite brand of local calendar application is.

But to address your concern of gmail-only addresses, while that's a really stupid limitation, you can always forward your gmail account to whatever email address you want. You can create a new gmail account specifically for calendar notices and then just forward all mail from that account to whatever email address you want.

Robert
6.   At 6:50 p.m. CDT on May 1, 2006, Robert wrote:

Isn't it possible to create a filter to forward those reminders to an outside address?

Brent O'Connor
7.   At 8:12 a.m. CDT on May 2, 2006, Brent O'Connor wrote:

Robert, Not to my knowledge.

Senthil
8.   At 11:16 p.m. CST on Jan. 31, 2007, Senthil wrote:

Go to your Gmail settings and click on Filters. Then create a new filter...in the second step of the process it allows you the option to forward the filtered messages to an external email address.

Using this, you could forward all reminders from the Google Calendar to an external email address.

Cheers!

Brent O'Connor
9.   At 9:12 a.m. CST on Feb. 1, 2007, Brent O'Connor wrote:

Senthil,

I just tested forwarding reminders with the instructions you gave. It worked great, however the reminder that is forwarded isn't that helpful considering you just get two ICS files as attachments in the reminder that is forwarded. I double clicked on each of the files in Mac Mail and it opened up iCal but then didn't do anything.

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